Sunday Sundries, 75

1. AOTW--No one stood out this week, other than the usual traffic-wackos.

2. I've not been able to post much this week because some virus had settled in for an extended visit. (I did not even go out of the house yesterday but slept virtually all day.) I feel a bit better this morning, and Joyce and I went over to Open Door for coffee and the New York Times, a ritual I simply could not endure missing. Feeling a little woozy--but better. So ... here we go ...

3. The horrors in Paris do not need yet another voice. But sorrow dwells in this house.

4. This week, I finished the late novel by Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), an epistolary novel about a journey around England and Scotland. (Smollett was a Scot.) Clinker himself appears to be a very minor character for much of the novel, but then ... things change. I felt--at times--that there was too much travelogue, but other times I saw the sharp satire of English ways, and the topic of class (so important to the English) arises in various--and sometimes disturbing--ways.

As I've posted before, I've been slowly working my way through all of Smollett and am now reading the final one--The History and Adventures of an Atom, which appeared a couple of years before Clinker.

5. This word-of-the-day from my tear-off calendar--bugbear--is one I think I've written about before, but I thought it would be interesting to post it again. It's not a word I hear very much--but it is one that I see in print now and again.

6. Joyce and I finished streaming the latest season of Death in Paradise, yet another British mystery series to which we've become addicted. The show, which takes place on a fictitious Caribbean island, is formulaic (at the end, the cops always gather all the suspects in a room and identify the murder), but rather than being annoyed by this, I find myself looking forward to it.

SPOILER ALERT: We were a little slow to start this new season because we knew that the quirky English detective (whom we really liked) was going to die in the initial episode, but we eventually succumbed to curiosity and started it up, END OF SPOILER ALERT. It took us a while to get used to the new quirky English detective, but we eventually did, and we've ended up liking him a lot, too.

It's a tricky show, racially. The White Guy is the brilliant one--you know? But I noticed this season (3rd) that the islanders who compose his investigative team are contributing more and more to the solutions. But ... it's always The White Guy who has the series of intuitive insights that solve the thing--just as it was in the previous seasons.

I see that there will soon be a season 4 available--and a season 5 is set to go. Good news for the Streaming Junkies here in Hudson, Ohio.

7. Plain Dealer watch: Where did this Sunday's book reviews come from? Three full reviews this week (the norm)--2 from the New York Times, 1 from Dayton Daily News.